“Today they kill us. Tomorrow they kill you.” That was one of the more stirring slogans shouted by some of the at least 10,000 marchers in Kabul, Afghanistan, just a few hours before the pipes began trilling and the dignitaries began laying their wreaths for the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

The Kabul demonstration was a sobering reminder that the gallant cause for which 158 Canadian Forces members gave their lives in Afghanistan was not won when the last contingent returned home last year. Nor did that cause begin for Canadians only 12 years earlier, with the first deployment of Joint Task Force 2 in the weeks following Al-Qaida’s attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s an older, civilizational struggle. It recognizes no borders and allows no innocent bystanders. It pits the liberty of the individual and the legacy of the Enlightenment against theocratic barbarism and police-state totalitarianism, and it is a rare thing for a Canadian to articulate that understanding of the war now underway around the world with such moral clarity as has 32-year-old John Robert Gallagher from Wheatley, Ont.

Gallagher, formerly of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, was killed last week in Northern Syria while fighting alongside Kurdish partisans against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In an essay he wrote before setting off for Kurdistan in May, Gallagher explained why he was going. “We are all on the front lines of this conflict, whether we know it or not,” Gallagher wrote. The war is unfolding not only in faraway places, but is also a terror that is enfeebling “cartoonists, satirists, publishers and booksellers, news media and educators” in Western countries.

Gallagher took particularly careful aim at “pacifists and the appeasement left,” and ridiculed the faddish preoccupation in Canada with “Islamophobia” as something that is, as often as not, a surrender to the very fearmongering the term’s deployment purports to strike a pose against. It is a posture that reflects “a deep contempt for the character of immigrant Muslims,” rather than the respect that Muslims deserve as individuals capable of making their own rational choices.

In Kabul, the massive anti-terror demonstration was only the latest surge in a convulsion of popular Afghan revulsion over a series of recent outrages in Islamist barbarism in that country. The protestors were following a multi-ethnic procession carrying the coffins of seven Hazaras whose beheaded corpses were discovered last weekend in the Taliban-harried province of Zabul, where jihadists have also lately sworn allegiance to ISIL, the scourge of the Kurds in Syria and Iraq.

The Hazaras are a Shiite Muslim minority who were subjected to genocidal violence during the days before the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Their predicament was not unlike the catastrophe facing the Kurds in their struggle to resist the equally genocidal forces of ISIL.

It is worth noticing that popular protest is now possible in Afghanistan only because of a NATO-led intervention that was broadly supported by Afghanistan’s Sunni and Shia Muslims — especially democrats, feminists and secularists — but “progressive” Canadian opinion opposed and recalls even now only with a sneer. Another irony: while Gallagher’s succinct manifesto took particular aim at the privileged 1960s-era “pacifists” who dominate the ranks of Canadian leftists nowadays, he himself comes from an older, sturdier tradition of left-wing internationalism that once set Canada apart from both Europe and the United States.

It pits the liberty of the individual and the legacy of the Enlightenment against theocratic barbarism and police-state totalitarianism

Among the books Gallagher was reading before he set out to volunteer with Kurdish partisans in the spring was George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the memoir the great anti-totalitarian polemicist wrote of his time as a volunteer with the anti-fascist republicans in the Spanish Civil War. As Maclean’s magazine writer Michael Petrou points out in Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, the definitive book on the Canadian volunteers in Spain, Canada contributed nearly half the number of anti-fascist volunteers to the Spanish-republican cause as did the United States, even though Canada’s population was only about a 10th of America’s. Britain was five times as populous as Canada but contributed only a few hundred more volunteers. At least 1,700 Canadians sailed off to Spain to fight the Nazi-aligned forces of Spanish General Francisco Franco. More than 400 never made it back home.

The Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) guerillas in Northern Syria that Gallagher joined as a volunteer are also strikingly similar in their outlook to Orwell’s libertarian-socialist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) comrades in Spain, although the YPG has renounced Marxism, leaning instead towards a nearly anarchist model of decentralized, multi-ethnic popular democracy. Even so, Gallagher’s commitments directly descend from the clearest articulations of the causes that Canadians will recall in Remembrance Day commemorations honouring the sacrifices of our soldiers and their families down through the generations. These are commitments that bind Canadians from the First World War through the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War contributions in United Nations peacekeeping missions, the UN-mandated Afghan intervention and the minor but brave effort Canada’s Special Operations Regiment is still making in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The right of small nations to self-determination and the rights of all people to the rule of law, liberty, democracy, equality and individual freedoms — that is the cause that leaps off the page of Gallagher’s essay, and it is what Canadian soldiers have always fought and died for. No snivelling about “us” imposing “our values” on “them,” no boring appeal to Canadian vanity, no whinging about Canada’s allegedly lost reputation on the “world stage.” Not for Gallagher.

Gallagher was a proud Canadian, wholly unapologetic about the “Canadian values” we have traditionally professed to espouse and mercilessly contemptuous of the the bourgeois intellectual masochism he saw as supplanting those values: “Because of our beliefs, we live in the most racially inclusive, sexually liberated and anti-imperialist society which has ever existed in human history, and to teach young people anything different is a criminal act of intellectual violence.”

Gallagher was an intellectual and an activist as much as a soldier. He enlisted with the 2nd Battalion of the PPCLI straight out of high school and served a tour in Bosnia. He ran for city council in Toronto’s Ward 8 on a kind of independent, anti-poverty ticket in 2010. After he earned his masters degree in political science at York University, he considered taking up a PhD, but the Kurdish cause summoned him back to arms. Canadian embassy officials from Baghdad met Wednesday with representatives of the YPG in Irbil, Iraq, to discuss an itinerary for the repatriation of Gallagher’s remains to Canada.

The Canadian Heroes Foundation, which supports veterans and their families, regards Gallagher as a fallen soldier, entitled to full honours — he was not a “mercenary,” a slur that has come up in connection with his enlistment with the YPG, the foundation’s founder, Chris Ecklund, told me. “John Robert Gallagher heard the call and he answered the call. He paid the ultimate sacrifice.” Ecklund was spending Remembrance Day afternoon with Gallagher’s family.

There is cause for more than mourning on the anti-ISIL front and despite the recent blitzes of civilian targets in Syria by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s air force. Militias under the Free Syrian Army umbrella have made substantial gains lately and the Kurdish YPG has scored dramatic successes against ISIL in northeastern Syria in a new alliance with Assyrian Christian guerrillas and a newly formed Syrian Arab Coalition. La lutta continua, as the Spanish republicans used to say.

When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said 'Hello' and started to ask if this was a prank

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